alt-J is all over the place

Sophomore album, ‘This Is All Yours,’ is a sonic journey

Since alt-J released its 2012 debut, An Awesome Wave, the group has sold over a million albums and won a Mercury Prize. The group lost a member (bassist Gwil Sainsbury) and faced larger audiences surrounding the release of its sophomore effort This Is All Yours. But the spotlight offered freedom rather than pressure. “We felt like the first album was quite weird, and people seemed to like it,” says keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton. “We felt kind of free to do our own thing with this album.”

Replicating the relaxed evenings spent writing songs and drinking beer that yielded alt-J’s debut, the band rented a space in London to record the follow-up. “We’d go in every day and hang out, write songs, but also just have fun, sit around, drink coffee, and whatever,” Unger-Hamilton says. “It was a mixture of socializing and making music.”

The laid-back atmosphere provided the time to ruminate on songs while also facilitating more off-the-cuff compositions such as the group’s breakout single, “Left Hand Free,” a catchy number the group’s members have laughed off in interviews. “Joe had this guitar lick that we’d had for years, and we were in the studio having a laugh and he was playing it,” Unger-Hamilton says. “We smashed it out into a song in about 40 minutes.”

While the original song clocked in at just over a minute, it was a push from the label that had them flesh it out into a three-minute single.

But “Left Hand Free” was the exception, both in its quick writing process and the label’s influence. A tempered pace allowed the songs to develop into eclectic, layered pieces. Distortion blends with natural sounds and vocal harmonies to communicate emotions and visuals, sometimes before the lyrics come in. “A voice in our music isn’t distinct from the instruments, it’s just another instrument,” Unger-Hamilton says. “So whether it’s singing words or making sounds, we blur those boundaries a lot.”

“Nara” stitched together several ideas that ultimately had two offshoots, “Arrival in Nara” and “Leaving Nara.” Every detail was tweaked until it felt perfect, and despite the fact that those tracks take their names from a city in Japan, This Is All Yours is hardly a concept album set in a particular location.

Songs scatter across different settings, real and imagined: “Bloodflood Pt. 2” takes place in a Southampton park; “Left Hand Free” finds itself in a speakeasy bar during Prohibition. Literally and figuratively, alt-J can’t seem to stay in one place. For the time being, though, wandering around is working out fine.